The movie begins with this sentence shining on its beginning credits: "Based on Jonathan Swift's immortal tale". But that's not true, as it is very loosely based on Swift's classic. Actually, the plot is this: A man –whose name is Lemuel Gulliver- is being shipwrecked and washes onto a beach near Lilliput, a miniature city with very short and funny people. The Princess Glory of Lilliput and the Prince David of Blefuscu are going to marry, but their fathers make war, because of their argument about which one of their national anthems to be played in the wedding.
Apparently, we only watch a quite lovely romantic comedy caricature of Gulliver's first travel to Lilliput and Blefuscu, which ignores the rest of Swift's book and the most contents of Gulliver's very first travel, especially its thematic statements. This is one of its major weaknesses. The plot's timing, is another notable aspect: Gulliver wakes up for the first time in the 38th minute (exactly in the middle of the movie); and the first act ends in the 48th minute, which is more than 60% of the whole time!
But, the first act's final sequence, where the people of Lilliput are taking care of Gulliver and making him up while singing the lovely song "It's a Hap-Hap-Happy Day", is probably one of the most memorable sequences in the history of animation. There are other lovely and unforgettable sequences: I love the scene where the people of Lilliput are going on the bridge to find "the giant" at night, while we can see the lights of their lanterns and torches through the gaps between the wood boards of the bridge. I love those very lovely and unforgettable kings, King Bombo of Blefuscu and King Little of Lilliput. I love that trio of "dear spies" of King Bombo (Sneak, Snoop, and Snitch) along as Twinkletoes, the funny carrier pigeon. And I love those two lovely neighbours, the old man who always has a big funnel as a hearing aid in his hands and the young man who always gets angry and cry out to him when he can't hear well.
To be honest, the story and its animation form is really lovely, as long as we can ignore Princess Glory and Prince David. They are two serious humans, two serious lovers from our world, but in Lilliputian and Blefuscian sizes. They are quite different from other characters both by form and personality, and they disfigure the whole movie. The idea of merging two national anthems to make a united love song which would unite them and also their nations is nice, but I wonder why the directors of animation insisted on creating those two characters quite different from the other people of Lilliput and Blefuscu, even from their own fathers.
This animation movie, is a lovely unforgettable classic which could be very better.

P.S. That's quite strange to me, that why there are very few female characters in this movie! Actually, except Princess Glory and less than two or three citizens of Lilliput whom we see in less than two or three very short shots, all other characters are men!

...for uploading a complete and beautifully restored version of this classic, in a high-quality video format (DiVX), to the Archive. It is available at http://www.archive.org/details/gullivers_travels1939_divx where it is listed Under Open Source Movies.

good film. pity the scene where gulliver is first found has been left out for some unknown reason. it brought back a few memories.

This movie was Paramounts attempt to get even with Disney after Snow White came out in 39. And, if I recall correctly, lead animator for Disney, Ub Iwerks, was lured over to Fleischman's studio at this time. Iwerks was the animator for the early Mickey Mouse. If you perceive a simularity between the dwarves and the Lilliputans -- it's not an accident!

I am currently doing a research paper on what qualities of the novel make it so adaptable to childrens films. This film has been greatly altered so that it is easier to comprehend by young children. However, the directors made explicit use of the first voyage because it is the most appealing visually. Children long to be a giant, because they are faced with the task of being the "little beings" and must rely heavily on everyone else.

I love this old classic. Great animation compared to a lot of the square, choppy and non life-like cartoons they have today. Good family entertainment. Thank you.

thanxxxxxxxxx

Okay I hope some High Doodah here can help get this file in the right place. (And before I go farther, rest assured that yours truly will most likely not be uploading any more films this size, if any. Downloading files is fast for me, but uploads are another story. Took me over 2 hours to upload this via FTP. So yeah, this won't be a repeat kind of deal.)

Anyway ... not sure if I did this right. First of all, I couldn't upload to the existing Gulliver's Travels directory, it wouldn't let me, I had to create a new directory. So that's where it went, but hopefully someone at archive.org can move it over. It went into this directory:

/gullivers_travels1939_divx

File name is gullivers_travels1939.avi

Figure that info might be needed for any High Doodah to readily locate it.

It's 700MB, 1:16:26 long, and yes, it has Gabby singing "all's well..." near the start.

So apologies for any goof on my part as far as submitting the file goes. Again, hopefully it can be remedied by someone and placed in the correct place.

My, my, my...

Obviously don't know what the heck I'm doing. Except going to bed now. lol

I'm not sure how thoroughly I skimmed, but there seems to be a missing scene at the beginning where the red-haired character with the high-pitched voice (Gabby?) sings a song (quote: "All's well, what a rainy day") while carrying a pail of water. If someone knows where I can find a copy of the movie with this scene I'd appreciate it. I saw the movie growing up and liked it, but this isn't a review so I'm not rating it.

Those who write some these reviews, I wonder what they are watching ort if they appreciate classics.
I agree with the positive responders, this is a true classic for both young and old.
Very well done and brings back memories from when I first saw it as a kid on "Family Classics".
Thanks very much for making this as wel as others of these great movies and cartoons avaiable to the public via Internet archives.

thanxxxxxxxxx

a combination of the traditional fleischer studios and early disney studios animation styles. they sometimes blend well together , sometimes not. young children usually like it(i know mine did) but most adults probably wont. having been raised on a variety of animation styles(warner bros.-hanna/barbera-early anime-early computer graphics) the 35-50 year olds out there (and the very young) havent been weaned on the cartoons of the past decade , which for the most part are either overly complicated , and cannot keep up with demand and are soon lost or forgotten , or they are one in a long list of the same crap half of the foreign market studios are producing for us (pokeman-et. all). given a chance , this film might delight them , but that audience usually wont give up the time to view something in a style that they are not overly familiar with. for those a little older , or a little younger , this is a pleasant little film. grandparents or parents with really young children---this could be some really nice quality time together.

Gulliver seems to be mostly an attempt by the Fleischers to not be themselves but be like Disney.

Shamus Culhane worked on this picture after leaving Disney and in his comments about it in his autobiography "Talking Mice and other People" regards it as somewhat disappointing.

This print seems to be missing a major scene near the beginning.

Fleischers' second feature "Hoppity Goes to Town" is much more characteristic of them and far better. I hope it shows up here someday.

Someone below said Dave Fleischer died in WWII? No, he died in 1979 after a long career.

The Fleischer Bros were great, Paramount animation not so great.
Together they chopped this story up into tiny fragments and missed the point of the story all together.
This is not the anti-war story it should of been, but a mushy comic love story.
It's well drawn but still is badly done.
Great for kids, bad for me.
Probably good for you because you never read Jonathan Swift, but you should.

There is a duplicate, possibly truncated copy at http://www.archive.org/details/gullivers_travels

this film is great. I love the nostalgia it creates in me. I first saw it when I was about 7, in 1983. We then bought it when it came out on video and it was one of my treasured films, but years later, I came to think about it and hunted for it on dvd which I have now. While it isn't as pitch-perfect as say Snow White, or Pinocchio, it does have an unmistakeable charm, and it is beautiful to look at. I love old animation. It's so crafted and cared for. The fact that every single thing you see for an hour and a half was drawn by someone lends a relevance to it that you just can't obtain with CGI cartoons of today. Personally, computer animated films to me are a gimmick, and are becoming so realistic in looks, that why not film them in real life?? So settle back with a beer in the warm and spend an hour and whatever with this movie. It's great, inoffensive, charming fun that will live on for a long time yet

this film is one of those that the characters movement are fliud and alive sometimes you wonder how they did it with no computers its all hand drawn hand inked. never mind the singing overlook that and enjoy it for what it is a cartoon

I feel a little bad about correcting Mr. Landless' critical view of this film in that "The Road to El Dorado" was produced by Dreamworks skg Studios and not Disney. That being said his review was great.

I am 65 years old (nee: 1939), at this writing, and Gulliver is the same age. I can remember my Mother taking me to the re-release of it when I was about 5 at the Fox Theater in Oakland, California. The Disney studios used the Multi-Plane camera to do "Snow White" 2 years earlier and the Flischers use the "Register and Shoot" method which is simple two Dimension.

The film was done by the Fleischer Brothers, Dave and Max, who also invented Popeye the Sailor and other memorable characters for Paramount (Famous Studios).

Another film they made was "Hoppity Goes to Town". Dave was killed in World War 2 and the features ceased. It is said that had he lived, he would have given Walt Disney real competition. You have to remember that the film industry was only about 38 years old and sound came in in 1929 with optical tracks.

This has always been one of my favorite films, but as mentioned in another review, the song "Alls Well" is omitted. This comes in when the little guy discovers the "Giant on the Beach" and long before the two Kings are talking about the forthcoming wedding. This sequence is short but adds to the story and sets the mood of the character (Fear).

I have seen this film several times and have rented it for my kids to see and now my grandson who is just 2 years old.

Yes, Gulliver is a classic film and well worth adding to your collections. It has sustained over the years and hopefully for many more.

This animated edition of Swift's classical utopian fable "Gulliver's Travels" is not only an amusing, if incomplete, rendition of the old tale, but also provides the viewer with an interesting insight into the differences between what is produced by the modern animation industry and what was produced by its counterpart in the 1930's.

The first thing that stands out is the length of the scenes. Compared to recent Disney releases, such as "The Road to El Dorado", where the length of the scenes are short, choppy and contain myriad angles and special effects, Gulliver's Travels is far more sedate. Its various angle shots are few and the film's scene length hints at a time when children and adults had more patience and longer attention spans.

Obviously there is little point in taking the time to download a film unless one can be assured of reasonable audio and visual quality - you want to be able to actually see what is being displayed on your screen and hear what is filtering through your speakers. By the same token, some degree of tolerance is to be expected from the viewer for the technological limitations of the era that, for example, invariably captured sound with a typical "monotonal pitched hollowness" so characteristic of the 1930's microphone devices. Also, it is to be remembered that this film was designed for, and intended to be used in, a cinema theatre in front of a large audience on a large screen, at a time when colour was the exception and not the norm. While people might have been willing to forgive "colour ripples" (where the inking seems to crawl or ripple from one scene to the next as a consequence of each frame being painted by hand), modern audiences are less inclined to be patient or sympathetic with such things.

However, if these elements of production are taken into account in an intelligent and serious way, the sound quality and the visual quality of the download is remarkably good. At times it is difficult to distinguish precisely what is being said, particularly as animated films utilise, by definition, silly cartoon voices. But on the most part the dialogue is intelligible. There are no problems with the video component of the download, being mostly crisp and clear. I recommend the MPEG4 download as a good trade-off between size of the file and playback quality. (The MP4 codec is available for free on the internet, and is only about a megabyte in size).

As for the film itself, one of the most noticeble peculiarities is that the dialogue is comparitively sparse when considered against the backdrop of a modern cartoon or animated film, where the characters seem to talk non-stop.

Another interesting facet is to note the stong theatrical and operatic influence on the production, which is seen in several dancing scenes, musical scenes and other very lengthy scenes of action and movement. It is important to point out that these very lengthy scenes may serve to diminish viewer appreciation of the story as a whole. At the time "Gulliver's Travels" was made, it was clearly envisioned that the audience would appreciate simply looking at amusing characters doing amusing things, which might not necessarily contribute to the overall plot.

The moral quality of the film is also interesting, being virtually obsolete by the standards of our age. For instance, it is assumed from the outset that marriage is the only acceptable relationship between men and women, that powerful giants ought not to abuse their influence and position, but ought to lower themselves to be subordinate to the interests of those weaker than themselves. The film also assumes that rivalry between nations is a natural condition but one which may be curbed and softened by the careful and thoughtful application of limited force. Certainly, more than anything else, this provides the viewer with a deep and meaningful insight into the pysche and social condition of the period.

As animated films go, it is not breakneck amusement with subtle intrigues as a plot device, and consequently it may not hold the viewer's attention as readily as other films - especially at one scene where the Lilliputians are trussing Gulliver up with a complex arrangement of ropes and scaffolding, a process that seems to last for a terribly long time - but altogether it is a worthwhile acquisition that no serious collection of historical films can afford to lack.

For me, this animated movie is a masterpiece. So many details in the characters and events.
I also think it was great to draw Gulliver after a living man (don't know which actor or person they take as the model), it gives another dimension to the movie.

Not sure why I dont remember seeing this growing up, I saw >every other cartoon ever made;-)...but this was very nice to see.

Definitely worth downloading if you like animated stuff.

This film I first saw at Saturday morning picture in London. I enjoyed it then and I have enjoy it again. The cartoons are fresh and are well worth learning from. For many years my wife humed a song from the film without a clue were it came from now we do.
Thank you for allowing us to revisit our childhood.